Yazan, initially a motivated supporter of the Free Syrian Army, eventually became deeply disenchanted with the path the revolution took. Radicalization and extreme violence drove many young militants like him out of Syria, and many of them sought refuge in Turkey. Yazan crossed the border into Turkey for the first time on January 16, 2013, and started looking for work, with plans to eventually go back to school. But while it might be relatively simple for Syrians to cross the border into Turkey, it’s generally a difficult life that awaits them there, with all the usual trappings of the life of a marginal and illegal migrant population: dead-end jobs, no prospects for education, and expensive accommodation are the standard experience.

The journey to Germany was fraught with uncertainty. We’ve heard the many testimonials of arbitrary detention and police brutality at the borders that form today’s refugee corridor in Europe, and Yazan’s story includes much of the same – clashes with police, hunger and harsh weather, being bussed off to unknown locations, waiting for 12 hours without any knowledge of what lies ahead.

Yazan went from the city of Bodrum in western Turkey to the nearby Aegean coast town of Didim, a popular resort destination in the Province of Aydin. His smuggler, a Syrian man working for a Turkish boss, who went by the name of Abo Abdo, charged him US$1300 to arrange his crossing into Europe. He put Yazan, along with 55 other migrants and refugees (17 from Syria, the rest from Iraq), in a large inflatable raft that landed one hour later in the Greek island of Farmakonisi, only 10 kilometers away.

They were met and temporarily detained by the Greek Coast Guard which took the group to the island of Leros, where they had to wait for a day before being set free. From there, they each paid 60 euros for a regular passenger ship to take them on a 36-hour, 317 kilometer ride to the port of Piraeus in Athens.

From Athens, Yazan and his travel companions took a 10-hour bus ride to the border with Macedonia, then crossed the border by foot and got on a northbound train as far as the border with Serbia. There they took a taxi across to board yet another train, this time to Belgrade. Once in Belgrade, a taxi charged them 200 euros to take them to the border with Hungary, near a town called Horgos, where they found their first major obstacle: on September 15, the Hungarian authorities closed the border with Serbia and deployed riot police to repel migrants who tried to enter the country. The chaotic scene was broadcast live across the world, and Yazan was in the middle of it. More than 10,000 refugees waited in vain for the right-wing government of Hungary to allow them to make the crossing. Yazan spent two days on the border, sleeping in the cold and with little to eat, until finally a rumor began to spread that they had to go to Croatia to continue their journey to Germany – and luckily for Yazan, the border there was still open and he was able to continue. After one day in Croatia, it was a fairly simple jump to Hungary and then to Austria.

Yazan hated sleeping in the cold and not being able to use a decent bathroom for days, and given his diet limitations as a Muslim, food was especially scarce for him along the way. Finally, at 9:00am on September 21, 2015, on what he recalls as a “good day”, Yazan finally crossed the border into Germany. Border police officers were waiting there for incoming refugees, and he was sent with a group of others in a bus to a refugee camp in Wiesbaden, in the west of the country, where he would spend the following weeks as an asylum seeker.